Cheriton Primary School

The school is vibrant, cultural heritages are valued and celebrated. Outstanding engagement with parents. Pupils lives are enriched because you make the most of the diverse cultral and social mix. All staff are proud to work here and enjoy being part of the school. Ofsted

Multiplication & Division

All of these concepts involve proportional and multiplicative relationships and the bar model is particularly valuable for representing these types of problems and for making the connections between these concepts visible and accessible.

Multiplication

Notice how each section of the bars in the problem below has a value of 4 and not 1. This many-to-one correspondence, or unitising is important and occurs early, for example in the context of money, where one coin has a value of 2p for example. It is also a useful principle in the modelling of ratio problems.

Peter has 4 books Harry has five times as many books as Peter. How many books has Harry?

4 × 5 = 20 Harry has 20 books

Division

When using the bar model for division it is the image of sharing rather than grouping which is highlighted in this representation.

Mr Smith had a piece of wood that measured 36 cm. He cut it into 6 equal pieces. How long was each piece?